A major part of the ontologist’s dream has always been to find a small number of fundamental categories—maybe one, maybe two or three or maybe ten—into which everything falls.
Aristotle says somewhere that the philosopher knows all things—in general terms. That’s the kind of knowledge the ontologist’s dream accomplishes. But I worry: isn’t there a deep hubris in thinking we can categorize fundamental reality? And aren’t we destroying the deep richness of reality by pushing into into a handful of categories?
Well, maybe not. After all, all books could be seen as finite sequences of a small number of symbols. (Recall the lovely argument in Plato’s Euthydemus that one can’t learn from books, because if you don’t know the alphabet, you can’t read, and if you know the alphabet, you already know all that is in the books, namely letters.) And yet among these arrangements—all of which are ontologically the same sort of thing—there are the Summa Theologiae, The Deluge, Hamlet, the Psalms, the best of the scientific literature… and the latest tweets from world leaders, too. One doesn’t destroy the richness of literature by noting that ontologically it’s all of a piece. Being all of a piece ontologically is compatible with great variation.
That said, I still have the worry. While there is great richness in literature, culture be impoverished if there weren’t painting, sculpture, dance, etc. Similarly, even if there can be enormous richness among monads, their apperceptions and their appetitions, wouldn’t reality be impoverished if monads, perceptions and appetitions were all there is?
